When I opened the Elaine Ryan Home Decorating Kit and saw the big grid-marked board and the sheets of tiny furniture cutouts, I was hooked. If the nation’s top CEOs can play with LEGOs to stimulate their creativity, I can darn well play house. I got out the measuring tape and measured my Problem Room, finally learning the exact wall space after years of eyeballing the windows and closets, sighing, and giving up.
There was a foot more than I thought—plenty of room to shift the desk. You don’t care about that. You want to know about the kit’s color swatches, which are odd—and even, meaning they are numbered in two separate sets and the only rule is that you stay within your set. I thought this concept was ridiculous when I looked at the first set, because all the colors looked just a bit off to me and I couldn’t imagine loving and working with anything in that huge palette. Then I picked up the other set and found every single color in our house. Not so ridiculous after all.
Feeling a twinge of guilt for not trusting Elaine, I looked up her bio. She was a founding member of the International Interior Designers Association, and she’s written about psychology as well as design. She designed the kit with her daughter, and they’re still speaking, which bodes well for the color harmonies.
I liked Elaine Ryan even more when I read the kit’s color booklet. It busts one myth after another, like a prizefighter taking on all comers. She urges you to treat every room individually, instead of running some boring beige through the entire house so it will “flow.” (Rivers must flow. Your home is not a river.”) Ceilings shouldn’t be white, they should be the color of the walls, especially if you want the room to look bigger. Fabrics are not, in themselves, easygoing or formal; linen, tightly upholstered on an antique chair, can be elegant, and raw silk can be artlessly casual. A room’s mood doesn’t come from the art on its walls or the décor on its table tops; the mood comes from the color.
Ryan lost me when she insisted on a colored phone in the bathroom, “so you are always connected.” And her section on “sensuous bedrooms” is a good prompt, but its spriggy country-French option feels somehow very, very wrong.
On the bright side, the grocery-store test she suggests is a blast. Granted, I’ll be stocking shelves at Whole Foods to pay that week’s grocery bill, but I can’t think of a better way to break old habits and find out what colors you’re really drawn to, and will be happy living with. I never would have chosen eggplant, until I did.
Now, it just might be the main color in the No-Longer-a-Problem Room.
